From newegg it looks like the prices on the other cards are: V4800: $160 (MSRP $189) V5900: $430 (MSRP $599) V7900: $700 (MSRP $999)
Depending on your uses it looks like the V4900 would probably be worth the $30 price from a V4800, but not sure about the $240 premium for the V5900.
There are some benchies here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&... Looks like it is quite a bit better than the V4800, most of the time better than a V5800 and beaten by the V5900 but for the price is a very good deal. Kind of seems like the retail for the V4900 would be around the $160 mark of the V4800 with the V4800 having to drop.
"With professional cards however it’s typically drivers that are the bigger factor, and AMD would prefer to consider the V4900 as competition for the Quadro 600 based on the pricing."
Raw performance is certainly less important in the professional market than the ultra-competitive consumer market. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here though Ryan? Of course the V4900 is more comparable to the Quadro 600 since they're only $50 apart and not $200.
Does the industry in general (or specific verticals) really have any preference toward AMD or Nvidia? They both are certified for dozens if not hundreds of industry-niche software with few examples of only one or the other being a requirement.
Most companies use Nvidia out of marketing and past performance. However, a lot of AMD offerings are better value and they are aggressively pushing to regain their market share. It seems to me that with the development budget of AMD, ATi cards are now a very competitive offering with certain features unavailable to Nvidia such as multiple displays and very very high frame rates.
dont know anything about these type of cards and wondered what are they actually used for ? what makes them different to the cards i use for games ? and how are they at running games ?
They are used for professional work, ie 3D rendering and modeling, professional video creation, etc. They would underperform equivalent game oriented graphics cards, since the drivers are tuned to professional use (stability over speed). The physical differences arent that big actually, mostly what you get is driver support and optimization. There was a time where a few mods could turn a standard graphics card into one of these workstation ones, but they blocked that.
We just purchased the v4800 about 2-3 months ago, and just now was the V4900 has come out. Spec wise, it looks essentially the same, but has a few slight spec adjustments, and looking at Amazon the v4800 and v4900 are right around the same price. I just hope AMD doesn't drop support for the v4800, that seems to happen to me quite often with my cards. Overall, we've been happy with the v4800, it was a drastic improvement for AutoCAD and Sketchup over my 5770. I'm a little disappointed that nVidia has cornered so many partnerships compared to AMD though; AMD often has the superior hardware, and they're working on their software/driver support, now they just need to make sure everyone's on board with them (like Adobe only having CUDA support for certain apps).
With the recent offerings from AMD they are now securing more deals with vendors so now we have a choice of either AMD or Nvidia. From the benchmarks it looks like the V4900 is quite a bit better than V4800 but if you are happy with it I wouldn't upgrade. The V4900 is a very sweet spot that is its not much worse than its higher end cards.
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fic2 - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
From newegg it looks like the prices on the other cards are:V4800: $160 (MSRP $189)
V5900: $430 (MSRP $599)
V7900: $700 (MSRP $999)
Depending on your uses it looks like the V4900 would probably be worth the $30 price from a V4800, but not sure about the $240 premium for the V5900.
There are some benchies here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&...
Looks like it is quite a bit better than the V4800, most of the time better than a V5800 and beaten by the V5900 but for the price is a very good deal. Kind of seems like the retail for the V4900 would be around the $160 mark of the V4800 with the V4800 having to drop.
Taft12 - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
"With professional cards however it’s typically drivers that are the bigger factor, and AMD would prefer to consider the V4900 as competition for the Quadro 600 based on the pricing."Raw performance is certainly less important in the professional market than the ultra-competitive consumer market. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here though Ryan? Of course the V4900 is more comparable to the Quadro 600 since they're only $50 apart and not $200.
Does the industry in general (or specific verticals) really have any preference toward AMD or Nvidia? They both are certified for dozens if not hundreds of industry-niche software with few examples of only one or the other being a requirement.
KarusaUK - Monday, May 21, 2012 - link
Most companies use Nvidia out of marketing and past performance. However, a lot of AMD offerings are better value and they are aggressively pushing to regain their market share. It seems to me that with the development budget of AMD, ATi cards are now a very competitive offering with certain features unavailable to Nvidia such as multiple displays and very very high frame rates.eastyy - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
dont know anything about these type of cards and wondered what are they actually used for ? what makes them different to the cards i use for games ? and how are they at running games ?tipoo - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
They are used for professional work, ie 3D rendering and modeling, professional video creation, etc. They would underperform equivalent game oriented graphics cards, since the drivers are tuned to professional use (stability over speed). The physical differences arent that big actually, mostly what you get is driver support and optimization. There was a time where a few mods could turn a standard graphics card into one of these workstation ones, but they blocked that.somesome11 - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link
We just purchased the v4800 about 2-3 months ago, and just now was the V4900 has come out. Spec wise, it looks essentially the same, but has a few slight spec adjustments, and looking at Amazon the v4800 and v4900 are right around the same price. I just hope AMD doesn't drop support for the v4800, that seems to happen to me quite often with my cards. Overall, we've been happy with the v4800, it was a drastic improvement for AutoCAD and Sketchup over my 5770. I'm a little disappointed that nVidia has cornered so many partnerships compared to AMD though; AMD often has the superior hardware, and they're working on their software/driver support, now they just need to make sure everyone's on board with them (like Adobe only having CUDA support for certain apps).KarusaUK - Monday, May 21, 2012 - link
With the recent offerings from AMD they are now securing more deals with vendors so now we have a choice of either AMD or Nvidia. From the benchmarks it looks like the V4900 is quite a bit better than V4800 but if you are happy with it I wouldn't upgrade. The V4900 is a very sweet spot that is its not much worse than its higher end cards.